Quilting

Our family quilts were not gently used; they were vigorously loved. … [T]hey became picnic blankets, they were flung over a card table or clothes-drying rack to serve as tents, and they were spread out as landscapes for Matchbox car journeys and doll tea parties. Threads loosened, fabric ripped, and batting leaked out.

“The Art of Quaker Quilts,” Friends Journal, September 2022.

As a person with no sewing skills whatsoever, I will never be able to create a quilt of my own for future generations to love. I know this, because I find it hard to hem a pair of pants or reattach a button without making a mess of it. I like to think, though, that some of us serve a different purpose, as preservers and archivists. That’s why I was thrilled to share my family quilts in Friends Journal. Now two of our family quilts have been immortalized through the magic of print.

The power of creating things on paper is certainly not to be despised, and I’ve decided that my life’s-work quilt will have to be made up of words. Over the years I’ve collected several fantasy quilt materials, things that really could become a quilt in the right hands. There’s the dress my mother wore to her brother’s wedding in the late 1950s, with a small burn hole in the satin bow at the waist where she leaned too close to a hot stove; the strapless sundress she made for me when I was in college; and the blue kimono with pink and gold batik flowers I received during an exchange trip to Japan. Not long ago my mother added another item to my fantasy quilt fabric collection. She had a length of light pink cloth draped over the front of her walker. I saved this for you, she said. She had discovered, in a dark corner of the linen closet, a pink apron with tiny patch pockets that her mother had made for her when she got married in 1953. It looked exactly like the type of apron that ladies wore in 1950s magazine advertisements for aluminum foil.  

Free of the boundaries dictated by needle and thread, my word-quilt will be able to contain all of these fabrics plus many other treasures—my grandmother’s blue willowware plates; the model of a dugout canoe that I made during fourth grade with the help of my dad and his blowtorch; the porcelain doorknob my uncle saved for me before my grandparents’ house was demolished; and the arrowhead I found in the creek behind my parents’ house.

My imaginary quilt of fragments has the potential to grow large enough to span several counties. A road of stitches can connect our little farm to my parents’. The stitching will become a creek, down which the little dugout canoe navigates. The creek will connect the pond to a tree-circled back field where many holiday dinners have been walked off. The field will be appliqued with round hay bales and deer and the ghosts of beagles past. A length of pink cotton is embroidered with bluebirds and bob-whites, and the blue of my kimono swims with bass and bream.

Working toward the center of my quilt, distance will magically contract. My parents’ land will connect to my grandparents’ farm and the nearby grove where my grandfather’s grandparents once lived beside the Up River Friends Meetinghouse. A zig-zag pattern of tall pines will link these smaller squares to vast expanses of open fields and shaded lots where pigs bang the metal lids of their feeders and scrabble their feet to flee to a far corner when a child comes to hang on the fence and see what they’re doing.

That’s the crazy quilt that I’m in the process of patching together. And though it isn’t done and probably never will be, I’d like to spread it before you—humbly, in keeping with its nature—and invite you to join me and all those who came before me to a tea party on the grass.

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